cocotron

For me, the most eye-opening codebase of my career was Cocotron, around 2007: https://github.com/cjwl/cocotron I was looking for a way to port my native Mac Cocoa apps to Windows. I had been already disappointed by the aimless sprawl of GNUstep. This one-person project implemented all the essential APIs for both Foundation and AppKit. Reading the code was a revelation: can it really be this simple and at the same time this effortlessly modular for cross-platform support? I contributed a few missing classes, and successfully used Cocotron for some complex custom GUI apps that needed the dual-platform support. Cocotron showed me that one person with a vision can build something that will rival or even outgun large teams at the big tech companies. But focus is essential. Architecture astronauts usually never get down from their high orbits t

Judging from GitHub, it looks kinda dead [1]. GNUstep for Windows [2] might be a better choice (and more likely to be up to date and complete since it is still in active development) to port something from macOS. Although you may need to have some GNUstep libraries on the system to run the application (or install them alongside your application). In traditional GNUstep fashion, it is unclear from their site what exactly is needed and why and gives the impression that you need to install the entire GNUstep just to run a simple application. [1] https://github.com/cjwl/cocotron [2] http://www.gnustep.org/windows/installer.html